The Museum of Modern Art (New York) Knihy

Choosing 1,000 works to represent a museum with over 100,000 pieces is a remarkable feat of curation. This extensive catalog showcases the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first museum dedicated to 19th and 20th-century art and modern disciplines like photography, film, and industrial design. The 600-page volume begins with multiple frontispieces for each department, followed by a detailed introduction covering the museum's directors, exhibitions, donors, acquisitions, and architecture. The heart of the book features 1,000 works from six curatorial departments: Painting and Sculpture, Drawings, Prints and Illustrated Books, Architecture and Design, Photography, and Film and Video. Each section is prefaced by an essay detailing the development of the collection. Stunning color illustrations of iconic pieces, such as Cezanne's The Bather and Munch's Madonna, leave readers in awe of the museum's holdings. Originally published in 1984 and reprinted in 1997 by Abradale, this catalog remains a valuable testament to the quality and breadth of one of the world's premier art collections, despite not being updated since its first edition. It evokes a desire to explore all the works that didn’t make the cut.

A challenging exploration of the early decades of modernism in the arts, published to accompany the first of three cycles of centennial exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, beginning in October 1999. Modern Starts focuses on art from 1880 to 1920, juxtaposed with examples from later periods, and is organized around three themes. People treats the great period of early modern figurative art from Matisse, Rodin and Munch; Places features landscapes and cityscapes by such artists as Atget, Cezanne, de Chirico and Leger; and Things addresses the importance of object-like works, from Rietveld's and Wright's chairs to Duchamp's Readymades and Brancusi's sculpture, and representations of things from Picasso's still lifes to advertising posters. Perceptive contrasts, new contexts and inventive interplay of mediums provide a study of the beginning of modernism. All works are illustrated from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art.